Substandard support

Hi Guys,

Just lately the support that is coming out of Novell is a joke!

I currently have 2 open SR’s,

The 1st one has been open for almost 2 month now and there has been no progress made what so ever. When I opened this SR I was asked to call back in 3 hours as there was no one currently available to take my call. As part of the partner net program the Technical Support Response Time is 1 hour 24/7? Not call back later.

When I finally got to talk to support I was told that ZCM was not supported when installed on a d:\ when I questioned this I was told that my issue was cosmetic and nothing to worry about. This is not the case and again I questioned this as a result my SR has been transferred to the Novell Zenworks Advantage Team. I am not sure what the Novell Zenworks Advantage Team does as they are not helping me with this SR, These guys don’t even reply to email or Voice mails.

The 2nd SR i opened at the start of this week i have one email from the support team requesting a chat season at 12:30am. I have not heard from them since. Again 24/7 ???

Re: Substandard support

I'd have to agree w/ the above post. Front line support is not only a joke, it's nothing but frustrating. I posted about SR issues a few months ago, and it seems like nothing has improved. The substandard support coming out of Novell Front Line is just mind boggling.

I have one SR open now on behalf of one of our engineers (for a server I don't normally manage), where the front line engineer is making random guesses, and didn't catch something simple with the first CONFIG.TXT that was requested.

We were told to upgrade a bunch of modules that had nothing to do with the issue, one of them being NSS. We're not even running NSS on that server - all volumes are traditional NWFS. The CONFIG.TXT we sent should have made it obvious. We wasted an evening coordinating downtime and inconveniencing users to apply a patch that was useless.

We were then told to disable multiprocessor support on the box, when it wasn't an issue prior to SP8 being applied. Now they are asking for a coredump. It wasn't until I looked into doing the coredump for my colleague that I noticed that it wasn't possible because the server wasn't even using NSS, and realized that we had wasted our time.

Novell support used to be great, now every single SR I've opened within the last 4 years has been an exercise in frustration. I don't know how your front line engineers are being trained, but if they're asking for an abend.log and config.txt when the request is opened, what's the point if they aren't even looking at it?

So, to recap, we've gone from:1. Applying patches that aren't relevant to the problem2. Disabling multiprocessor support where it wasn't an issue previously3. Asking for a coredump

Seems like front line is all over the map with this one, and I'm really close to asking for my issue to once again be transferred to backline in Provo to get someone who knows how to troubleshoot.

It's support issues like this that make it more tempting for our management to move off of Novell products and go to a Windows environment.

Re: Substandard support

I appreciate the feedback so we can address it. I'll add that we've made impressive increases in our Customer Satisfaction scores over the last 2 years. We're on a good track and this type of feedback is helpful so we know where to continue to focus our continuous improvement efforts.

Ask the Support Engineer to escalate this if we're still not making adequate progress. Our mission statement is "We solve problems quickly!" So I want you to feel that sense of urgency when working with us.

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